Which camera shall I buy?

It is so obvious that it has to be explained. An expensive brush doesn’t make you a better artist and neither a better saw a better carpenter. When I was young and that is more years ago than what I like it to be, I was very interested in table tennis. I was good enough to be competitive enough to compete with friends, but not much more. One of the most discussed issues were around the blade and the quality of the rubber for maximum control. Keeping the rubber sticky was almost an obsession. Then I saw on TV the interview with one of Germany’s top table tennis players. I mean he was good, really good. Obviously he used one of the top blades with best maintained rubber. Well, that is what I thought. It turned out that his blade was totally worn down and he still was the top player in Germany. I learnt a lesson about skill here. If you are good at anything, it shines through with bad equipment or excellent equipment. You just know what you do.

I also have this fragmented memory of Helmut Newton at a famous German TV show, where the presenter handed him a cheap camera and asked him to snap pictures of some models in the studio. The result: Incredible images, because it didn’t matter what camera he used, but it mattered who used the camera.

Personally, I took some of my better pictures with the iPhone camera, which is really not a great camera. You work with the tool you have.

So, why would anyone buy an expensive DSLR? There are some advantages, but they begin to make sense only when you work seriously with your vision. Just remember taking the picture happens in the brain. The camera simply helps creating the image. Resolution, depth of field and short shutter lag are the main reasons I work with a DSLR. If money would not matter, I wouldn’t work with a DSLR, but with a Leica M9, which is smaller and carries some of the best lenses ever produced. I’ll come back to that a bit later.

What matters about the camera is, on how well you know it. The more complicated, the more options, the more difficult it becomes.

One more thing about big cameras. They are heavy!

If you are serious about photography and want to develop as an artist, limitation is your advantage. Henri Cartier Bresson took most (if not all) of his images with one lens, a fixed 50mm lens (yes, it was a Leica lens). In my opinion he is still one of the greatest photographers the world has seen. Check his pictures. They are not always perfectly exposed and there is lots of grain in some of the pictures, but what counts is the composition and form he saw. Just on the side: One of the best ways of learning photography is to go through images of the old masters and try to reverse engineer the image, keeping in mind the equipment they used. Your creativity will expand.

While I am on it. During the Photokina, exactly one camera that was presented excited me. It was not a Nikon, nor a Canon and definitely not the Titanium Leica M9 (which serious photographer cares about a titanium body if it doesn’t offers a new way of taking images. Sorry Leica, but you lost it here big time.) The camera that caught my attention was a digital Fuji camera, looking similar to a Leica M camera. It just had everything right. Logical use of focus, aperture and time and one lens in combination with a proper sensor size. Only problem. The camera was a prototype and could not even take pictures.

If this is not irony enough for you then let me top this. Leica has a camera with very similar specs, but doesn’t excite me that much. The Leica version simply lost to modern design, what Leica stands for. I hope that makes sense.

This seems to become a longer post than I planned. Let me stop her for today. In the follow up blog post, I will go more into detail why you shouldn’t care too much about Canon or Nikon. I can literally feel on how the members of the Cape Town meetup group will stare at me in disbelief…

Stay tuned.